Whenever I want to talk about bonds, I always know just who to call. Larry McDonald is a former bond trader at Lehman Brothers and author of the book, Colossal Failure of Common Sense. I highly encourage you to give it a read, especially if you're looking for some perspective on what really happened back in 2007-2008.

It's no coincidence that I reached out to him to come on the podcast. Larry and I had a very timely conversation in February of last year. So with the bond market recently losing 5-6 Trillion dollars in such a short period of time, who better to talk to than by favorite bond trader.

This was fun. We talked about the current move in rates and how that's impacting stocks and bond markets around the world. If you're looking for color on Credit Spreads and Yield curves, this is the episode for you.

What's better than a good conversation about bonds? 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories, along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

Every major asset class on Earth continues to illustrate risk-taking behavior on the part of market participants.

Yields, Oil, Equities, Base Metals, the Australian Dollar -- there's an overwhelming amount of new highs in offensive areas of the market right now. The weight of the evidence continues to suggest that we want to be buyers, not sellers, of stocks.

The same bullish developments and themes that we've been pounding the table on for months continue to reinforce our stance. Some examples: the rotation into SMIDs, breadth...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

We recently held February’s Monthly Conference Call which our Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll provide a summary of the call by highlighting 5 of the most important charts/topics we covered along with commentary on each.

Let’s dive into it.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

We continue to harp on the risk-on themes that support our bullish macro thesis.

Rotation down the market-cap scale, commodity strength, and defensive alternatives making new relative lows have been some major themes we continue to see play out.

As participation continues to expand in both the US and abroad, we're being given more and more avenues to position ourselves in order to profit in the current environment.

While Tech and Growth still remain the secular leaders, even the perennial laggards such as...

If you're ignoring the Indian Stock Market, I think you're doing yourself a huge disservice.

Even if you never plan on trading stocks in India at any point in your life, it doesn't matter. There's amazing information coming from there.

For example, take a look at that relative strength in Indian Bank stocks before US Stocks, and Stocks in general, rallied throughout 2019. That was an epic rally, if you recall.

The Indian Banks had already been telling us that it was coming!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Leadership in this environment is stretching far and wide.

We're seeing a growing number of industry groups and areas not only making new highs but also outperforming and offering us more and more avenues to express our bullish thesis on stocks and risk assets in general.

Last week, we discussed Commodities and Ags.

The week before that, we dove into Chinese equities.

And for some time now, we've been vocal on SMIDs in general.

The point is, with such an overwhelming amount of leadership these days, we can be picky and place our bets on only the best of the best in each group.

In today's post, we'll explore a hot new growth industry we haven't covered in much detail yet - Autonomous Vehicles.

We'll discuss the broad-based strength we're seeing from this group of stocks, and outline setups in some names we're...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

In last week's report, we played "devil's advocate" and laid out some of the more bearish developments we could find out there.

But all-in-all, the market is still providing bears less room to make a sound argument. We continue to find that any bearish evidence is primarily isolated to shorter timeframes... and even then, still overwhelmed by the abundance of bullish data points.

So while a minor rise in volatility can be expected in what tends to be a seasonally weak month of February, over a longer timeframe, we're still aggressive buyers of stocks.

When we poured over our...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

They say the Bond Market is where the smart money is. Maybe it is. I have no idea.

What I do know is that it's where a lot of the smart information is.

Due to the diversity among credit instruments, there is a swath of unique data that we can use not just for Bond prices and Interest Rates but also to glean insight into other asset classes.

I'm talking about things like TIPS for inflation expectations and Emerging Market or High Yield Bonds to analyze risk-appetite for other assets such as the stock market.

Alpha has been in Equities and risk-assets for a while now. As such, we haven't needed to discuss bonds from a portfolio perspective... but that doesn't mean we aren't paying close attention to these assets.

The Bond Market is overflowing with information. We'd be foolish to neglect it.

In this post, we'll dive into what we mean by this and share some of it with you. We'll also discuss the implications of what we're seeing in the...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

As we discussed in our latest report, bears are running out of any substantial fuel to support their position.

And despite the arrival of some long-awaited selling pressure last week, that absolutely remains the case.

From a more tactical standpoint, though, we're seeing early signs of some volatility moving into what is a seasonally weak post-election month.

In this post, we'll play "devil's advocate" and lay out some of the more bearish developments we could find out there right now. You know... the kinds of things that could start to...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

We continue to experience a bullish expansion in participation from stock markets around the world.

Just a few days ago we discussed buying Israeli stocks and explained how their strength at the index level was being driven by their heavy exposure to Technology.

Mega-Cap Growth and Tech stocks (we're including Communications and Discretionary here -- "Tech but not Tech" names such as Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD.Com, etc.) are also a dominant market force in China.

We wrote about this exact topic in November, and how strength from these names would likely continue to propel these Large-Cap Chinese Indexes and ETFs higher. The Chinese Tech ETF $CQQQ and iShares Large-Cap China ETF $FXI tacked on an additional 24% and 12%, respectively in the time since.

Now, we're seeing FXI back to its key former highs and attempting to break out of a decade-plus base. ...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Last week's Mystery Chart was the Israeli Tel Aviv 125 Index zoomed all the way back to the start of this century.

You might be wondering why we're discussing Israeli equities of all things...

The short answer: They're making new all-time highs.

In this post, we explore the sector that is mainly responsible for these gains, dive into its strongest components, and outline some long ideas with risk/reward setups skewed in our favor.

Not only is this yet another group of stocks we can use to express our bullish thesis on risk assets -- it is also excellent information. Once again, we're seeing another development pointing to the increasing participation and improving breadth across international equity markets.

This move in Israeli equities also fits into a larger theme that is taking place beneath the surface for stocks all around the world. It's difficult to overstate the significance of these moves.

In short, we believe this is one of the...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

As we discussed in last week's report, bears have a lot of work cut out for them.

With all this rotation into offensive groups and cyclical areas of the market, they are really running out of talking points. We literally can't find a meaningful group of stocks in the US or even abroad that we would want to short at this point.

This is excellent information as it's not something we can say very often... and it's bullish, just to be clear.

The move higher in equities is being supported by significant cap-rotation at the index level as well as broad participation among sectors, and most recently, even international stock markets.

Basically, it's hard to find stocks that...